either, and I’d eaten alone and sparsely in the ale-house, surrounded by cider-swilling farmers.
Dudley said, ‘What the hell are we doing in this shithole, John? Remind me.’
‘We’ve come to search for the bones of Arthur.’
‘Have we found them?’
‘Not yet. I… went, on Cowdray’s advice-’
‘You told Cowdray why-? ‘No. Not exactly.’
‘ Jesu, John!’
‘I went to see a dealer in relics. He had a load of old bones… any old bones…’
‘From where?’
‘I don’t know. Stolen from church crypts, dug out of graves. People bring them to him, I’d guess, for pennies. He sells them to gullible pilgrims as saintly relics.’
‘He’d be a source, I suppose,’ Dudley mused, ‘if we don’t find the real bones. Though we’d probably need to get him killed afterwards.’
I stared at him. It might be the fever speaking or he might be serious. Either way, no time to tell him of my suspicion that Benlow might indeed know where the actual remains were to be found. What had been very clear to me was that something pertaining to the matter of Arthur had left that man sorely afraid.
‘ I’d find them,’ Dudley said, ‘if I could get out of this pit.’
‘Give it another day. Get up too soon and it’ll come back, only worse. Robbie…’
‘Get me a new nightshirt, would you, tomorrow? This one stinks to heaven.’
I pulled the stool away from the wall and sat down just outside the circle of candlelight.
‘He offered me an obvious fake.’
‘Who did?’
‘The relic man. He had a lump of wood which he said was from Arthur’s round table.’
‘Have you heard of the round table still preserved?’
‘Not here. Only the one in Winchester Cathedral. And we all know the truth of that.’
Everyone accepted that this huge artefact was Plantaganet fakery, maybe from the time of Edward III, who was crazy for Camelot, or even Edward I who had travelled to see the bones entombed at Glastonbury Abbey. The Winchester board had been further tampered with by the Great Furnace who, at a time of his own enthusiasm for all things Arthurian, had caused his own features to be imposed upon it.
‘This Benlow… he would’ve told me it was a piece of the true cross if he’d thought that was what I was looking for. Glastonbury seems to be a place where it’s ever difficult to make out the real from the false. If you’re an outsider, anyway. Look, your own vis-’
I broke off. Without thinking, I’d found myself giving voice to another matter which was denying me sleep. Too late, now.
‘Robbie, when you walked out to the abbey, last night, you said you’d seen-’
‘Don’t recall going to any abbey.’
‘I saw you from my window. You walked across the street.’
‘You were dreaming.’
‘You said you’d seen an old man. You said the old man was looking down on you, as if he was in the air, and you could see the moon-’
‘I was full of fever!’ Dudley pulled the blankets tighter around him. ‘Don’t you go throwing my sickbed fancies back at me!’
‘What about the Queen?’
He stared at me.
‘Does the Queen have delusions?’
‘How dangerously do you want to live, John?’
‘It’s said the Queen… sees her mother.’
‘Who says that?’ He tried to rise, slid back down. ‘What shit are they spreading around court now?’
‘I wouldn’t say that it’s being spread around. My source is… a discreet source.’
Dudley closed his eyes.
‘Anne Boleyn. God…’
‘Is it true?’
‘Crazed bitch.’
‘Anne Boleyn?’
‘Could’ve stopped all the talk. My father always said that. But maybe she liked it.’
‘The talk of witchcraft?’
‘Also, probably thought Harry liked it. Added to her allure. Her having a extra finger and all. And moles. They say she had a furry mole shaped like a…’ He closed his eyes. ‘And maybe he did like it. Maybe it oiled his lance. For a while. Until she was his wife – would all have to stop then. But, by God, if anyone thinks that Bess…’ Dudley’s eyes came open and he looked hard at me across the shadows. ‘You know, unless you really think you can help, you’d do best to forget this, John.’
‘Help?’
‘But then you don’t go in for the cure of souls, do you? Didn’t you once tell me that?’
I said, ‘Queen Mary-’
‘I always thought you’d prefer to forget Queen Mary, too.’
‘Do you remember telling me, some years ago, how Mary had oft-times warned the Princess Elizabeth to be seen to reject her mother and the Boleyn nest of Lutherans. Pleading with her to embrace the old faith while she yet could?’
‘I need to sleep,’ Dudley said. ‘Did you not tell me that?’
Back in my bedchamber, I stood by the window and gazed down into Glastonbury’s moonlit high street. Beyond it, the abbey’s arches, a company of the mournful dead.
I was remembering the townsfolk yesterday and my sense that they went about their business as if in a play. As if all of them knew that the town possessed a life beneath, which must needs be concealed for its own protection… except when reference to it might be used to secure the future, the way the monks of the twelfth century had used the bones of Arthur.
The monks. Guardians of this sacred ground for more than a thousand years.
What did that mean? What did it mean now? All abbeys and monasteries were repositories of ancient and esoteric knowledge, and if this had been the oldest of them all – the very foundation stone of Christianity in England – then, yes, it would have been heavy with sacred secrets.
As for the conservation of physical items of value, the gold and the bones… well, plans would have been made well in advance, individuals selected for the task of secreting them away when the abbey fell into the Great Furnace.
It could be that some of these items had been smuggled across to France or hidden in the wildest parts of Wales.
Yet…
…a hallowed place. Even with the abbey going to ruin. There are some things you can’t destroy. Some things about a place that are in that place.
I thought of Brother Michael, the mute who’d been with Fyche, and what jewels might be enclosed in his silent world. And I thought of Abbot Whiting, the benign old man who’d held on to his secrets, held out under torture, before a slow and savage death on the devil’s hill.
It seemed to me that I’d done the right thing in not asking Fyche about the bones. The man to ask would have been the abbot himself.
A shuddering breath came into me. Across the street, under a bloating moon, the corpse of the abbey lay restless and violated.
It was past three in the morning. I felt a pang of anxiety about my mother and Catherine Meadows at the house in Mortlake and knelt and prayed for their safety.
And then, knowing that if I went back to bed, my thoughts and dreams would once more go searching for the witch’s daughter, I shed my old brown robe and reached for my day apparel.
